


Wondrous Things

by sixappleseeds



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon Fix-It, if you don't see someone die on-screen they're not canonically dead right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 09:37:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13831446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixappleseeds/pseuds/sixappleseeds
Summary: In which Dimitri gets the chance for a happily ever after, too





	Wondrous Things

He hadn’t expected dying to take so long. A bullet to the belly, and how long does one have? Twenty minutes? Thirty? Combine that with three other holes, all leaking steadily out of one’s body, and that shortens one’s already considerably shortened amount of time. Surely he would die soon. He felt as though he’d been out here for hours. There was not a part of him that wasn’t soaked with water and screaming with pain. The pounding rain felt like so many shocks, unceasing and overwhelming, and it occurred to him that if he could move, flop over onto his side to at least shield his face, the movement might exacerbate his blood loss and hasten the whole dying process along.

Unfortunately he couldn’t seem to recall how, precisely, to roll over. The pain and the water and yes, maybe the shock of everything rendered him utterly resigned to his apparent fate of taking forever to die. 

Perhaps he could contrive, if he shifted his head enough, to simply drown. That would be faster, wouldn’t it? 

There was a temptation, a very strong one, to despair. He was bleeding out in a torrential downpour, utterly alone, and the last man who’d spoken to him had been entirely evil. (Here on the cusp of death he no longer felt it necessary to be fair, or diplomatic, or to refrain from hyperbole. One knows evil when one sees it. It has the same essence across countries and cultures, regardless of the face it wears.) 

He could despair, for the loss of not only his life, but his reasons for living. There would be no more science, soon. No more discoveries, nothing more to learn, or see, or share. That was hard to take. Though really it didn’t matter if it was hard to take, or easy, or just so-so. It was an indisputable fact, and his feelings on the whole thing were, not, in the grand scheme of things, worth consideration. He was dying. 

Any moment now.

Because the event would occur regardless of how he felt about it, he endeavored to not give into that despair, lurking ready at the edges of his albeit very fuzzy consciousness. Instead he tried to remember -- something good. Good things had happened. Just as he knew evil when he saw it, so he also felt positive he could recognize true goodness, and he’d seen it in the cleaning woman. Elisa. Her name was Elisa.

Where he had approached the creature with fear, awe, and frankly clinical fascination, she’d seen it -- him -- as someone enslaved, and worth freeing. Maybe, it occurred to him now, she’d even seen him as a friend. Surely that was goodness, embodied.

There was even something good about knowing that he’d lived in the same world as that beast. They had both inhabited, for however brief a period of time, the same reality. It was wondrous, and there was goodness in wonder too. 

In truth, he’d witnessed awesome things in his life, and even, in his small way, assisted in helping some of them happen. Right now, at the end of everything, knowing that was enough to outweigh all of despair.

Abruptly the rain stopped. He blinked open his eyes; the lids felt very heavy, and his glasses were askew and probably broken, but it seemed he hadn’t lost his vision yet. Two figures hovered over him. The police, he thought. Or another round of men, come to finish what his handlers had failed to do. The latter would bring his death immediately, but the former would prolong it indefinitely. 

He did not want to die in a prison cell.

Then one of them touched him, and he thought perhaps he had died already, and missed it, or maybe his brain was spinning hallucinations to cope with all the shock. But the touch became firmer, more sure, and as he felt it on his belly, then his shoulder, and finally his cheeks, he would swear those hands were covered in scales.

The second figure knelt by his head, holding an umbrella over his body, and with her other hand she adjusted his glasses, and brushed back his hair with gentle fingers. 

Slowly, so slowly he almost didn’t notice it, his pain eased. 

The world held onto him still, and the world still held wonder for him to behold, and it demanded that he stay around to bear witness to it. He saw that now, as clearly as he saw Elisa’s smile.

 

.

 

Queen’s Park on the first sunny day in May was lousy with students pretending to study, professors pretending to grade, and a few parliamentarians not pretending to do anything at all. Dimitri sat on a bench under the trees, which were finally turning green after what had seemed like an interminable winter, and caught himself smiling. 

Perhaps it was a risk, being outside like this in such a public place, but the winter, while gray, dreary, and cold in a way that made him bizarrely homesick, had also been very quiet. As far as he knew (and he had put some effort into knowing, laying low and listening carefully for months and months) once the asset and the American had been killed, Moscow had moved on to more reliable efforts. 

Anyway, he’d died that night too. 

Still...

“Oh my word -- Dr Hoffstetler?” 

Dimitri twitched, blinked, and peered up at the woman and man standing along the footpath before him. Then he blinked again. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who’d run for the border, after that night.

“Not anymore,” he said. Doctor Robert Hoffstetler was as dead as Dimitri Antonovich Mosenkov, though one name had been much easier to mentally shed than the other.

“Oh!” she said, studying him. She wore an orange and yellow dress and carried a bright green handbag, and she -- Zelda? the name came to him but he wasn’t certain it was hers -- she looked well. Especially as she smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Though you’ll have to tell me what I can call you.” 

“Bezdomny,” he said, prepared. “Bez, for short.” Americans, and their Canadian counterparts, always wanted short names, nicknames they called them, even though the one he’d chosen was already a nickname. He was working on becoming Bez.

The man beside Zelda, dressed in a rather ratty cardigan of indeterminate color, had been smiling benignly through all of this, and she poked him with her elbow.

“Oh,” he said, looking closer now. “Oh, good heavens! How wonderful to see you again!” 

Dimitri nodded, opened his mouth to say -- something polite, he wasn’t sure, meeting familiar strangers hadn’t been among his expectations for the day when he’d awoken this morning. 

But Zelda beat him to it. “You remember Giles, of course. Well, we both work over at U of T. Cleaning,” she added with a smile. “It keeps us legal. But we try to walk through the park every Sunday, rain or shine. That keeps us sane. These days you’ve got to do what you need to do to stay sane, I’m sure you understand.”

She hefted her handbag back onto her shoulder and peered him again. He was beginning to feel like one of his own specimens. “Do you work for the university too?” she asked. “Of course you do, they hired us, I’m sure the would’ve hired someone as smart as you. We should stick together. That’s what I said to Giles last fall, after everything. We should stick together. It’s important.”

She paused, and Giles shuffled a step closer. “I also teach art lessons on Sunday evenings,” he said, sounding a little proud of himself. “And Zelda’s taking some night classes. French!”

She elbowed him again, laughing, and the easy friendship between them struck somewhere deep in Dimitri’s belly, near, maybe, where a scar should’ve been.

“Anyway,” Zelda turned back to him, the laugh still in her eyes. “As I was saying, we should stick together. It’s important. No one else has seen what we’ve seen, and as Giles and I both found out, that’s awfully lonely. We found each other here, last November, and now we’ve found you. What do you say?”

The world indeed still held wonders for him to behold. He was making an effort, in this new, un-looked for life, to be worthy of them.

He smiled up at both of them, smiling down at him. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was partly inspired by [this picture](https://imgur.com/r/ImagesOfCanada/pw4pRkS), which my colleague had hanging in the office when I worked in Toronto 
> 
> Bezdomny means "homeless" in Russian and it's an anachronistic reference but only by maybe five years; I absolutely believe Dimitri would enjoy reading Bulgakov's _The Master and Margarita_ , just as soon as it's published
> 
> More headcanons I couldn't work into the fic and still keep it short:  
> \- Dimitri had a secret stash of papers hidden from even his handlers, and he uses these to cross the border and get a job at the University of Toronto's biology department  
> \- Zelda is taking French bc her co-workers are largely from Martinique and Haiti. They join the local union, and they're fierce  
> \- Giles teaches basically whoever attends his classes (held in a basement classroom in U of T's Trinity College), and gradually meets other people in the queer community, including a couple of men his age, and for the first time in his life he has Friends Who Know What It's Like


End file.
